Kill the Paper, Save the News

Short version: Interactive ad revenue up 15 percent for first half of 2008 vs. first half of 2007. Total revenues topped $11 billion for the first six months of ’08.

The day before, my favorite news-about-the-news newsletter, I WANT MEDIA, included the following items, in this order:

It brings me no joy to observe this continued bloodbath in the newsrooms of America.

But the sad litany above is clearly related to the continued rise in digital advertising revenues. Instead of laying off people from newspapers and hiding in the basement, leaders who are dedicated to the future of news just have to quit snorting sawdust and let the newspapers go. Not the news, but the newspapers.

Another item linked to in I WANT MEDIA made the point: Overextended media baron Barry Diller, head of the recently disassembled IAC, talked to the Wall Street Journal.

WSJ:Newspapers are suffering as advertising moves online. You are a director of Washington Post Co. Do you think newspaper companies will survive?

Mr. Diller:If they call themselves newspaper companies they are probably going to be toast. It will depend absolutely on what the product is. We’re still at such an early period to talk about the death of journalism.

Which is to say: There’s hope, but only if you drop the paper–and keep the news.

3 Comments on “Kill the Paper, Save the News”

Our newspaper in Kansas City built a brand new building just a few years back. Great looking, I just wonder how it will fare in the times ahead. I still get the print myself but I also like the online world of looking for what I want to read, not all the obscure information in a full blown paper.

I think that the ads in the Internet plays an important role and effective bad in terms of revenue, or from the psychological point of the consumer where there is the importance of advertisements before the start of dissemination of news or before and this is what I noticed by opening the computer to find all types of advertising bad economic, political, and I think that the declaration in Internet continues to grow